Alejandra Pizarnik – författare

"An aura of legendary prestige surrounds the work of Alejandra Pizarnik," writes César Aira. Her last collection to be published before her suicide in 1972, A Musical Hell is the first book of poems by Pizarnik to be published in its entirety in the U.S. Pizarnik writes at the edge of poetic impossibility, opening with a blues singer, expanding into silence, and closing into a theater of shadows and songs of the drowned.

Revered by the likes of Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolaño, Alejandra Pizarnik is still a hidden treasure in the U.S. Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962–1972 comprises all of her middle to late work, as well as a selection of posthumously published verse. Obsessed with themes of solitude, childhood, madness and death, Pizarnik explored the shifting valences of the self and the border between speech and silence. In her own words, she was drawn to "the suffering of Baudelaire, the suicide of Nerval, the premature silence of Rimbaud, the mysterious and fleeting presence of Lautréamont,” as well as to the “unparalleled intensity” of Artaud’s “physical and moral suffering.”

The Galloping Hour: French Poems—never before rendered in English and unpublished during her lifetime—gathers for the first time all the poems that Alejandra Pizarnik (revered by Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolaño) wrote in French. Conceived during her Paris sojourn (1960–1964) and in Buenos Aires (1970–1971) near the end of her tragically short life, these poems explore many of Pizarnik’s deepest obsessions: the limitation of language, silence, the body, night, sex, and the nature of intimacy.Drawing from personal life experiences and echoing readings of some of her beloved/accursed French authors—Charles Baudelaire, Germain Nouveau, Arthur Rimbaud, and Antonin Artaud—this collection includes prose poems that Pizarnik would later translate into Spanish. Pizarnik’s work led Raúl Zurita to note: “Her poetry—with a clarity that becomes piercing—illuminates the abysses of emotional sensitivity, desire, and absence. It presses against our lives and touches the most exposed, fragile, and numb parts of humanity.”

Diana's Tree is an important book - written in Paris, where she lived for four years - and the first really mature work (1963) by Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972), increasingly recognised as one of the major poetic voices of the second half of the 20th century in Latin America. "Reading Anna Deeny Morales's incisive translation of Alejandra Pizarnik is like experiencing Walter de Maria's Lightning Field - not in the New Mexico desert, but inside you. Psychologically strained and emotionally saturated, Pizarnik's poetry has electrified readers for more than sixty years. As gnomic, dreamy, passionate, and dark as the originals, Deeny's translations leave you singed- and glowing. " - Forrest Gander

"Aquí estoy, todavía", subraya Alejandra Pizarnik en la última carta que le dirigió a Ivonne Bordelois en julio de 1972. Y aquí están, ambas, en esta correspondencia que podría denominarse inédita por el gesto que implica su publicación: el de restituir la conversación entre dos poetas pero, sobre todo, entre dos mujeres que supieron construir una amistad sostenida de la poesía, sin más agregados que el de las palabras que se dirigieron una a la otra durante 11 años. Aquí está, también, una faceta de Pizarnik que suele quedar ensombrecida detrás del mito de la poeta suicida: su ternura y su luminosidad, su gracia y su humor, su generosidad y su enorme capacidad de trabajo con el lenguaje. Quizás el género epistolar sea uno de los lugares privilegiados para revelar que no existe la correspondencia entre los seres humanos, y quizás por esa misma imposibilidad se insiste. Bordelois y Pizarnik se acercan y se alejan, tropiezan con silencios y con malentendidos, comparten los pormenores y las alegrías de la escritura, ofrecen un mapa fervoroso de la época –político, social, literario–, se encuentran y desencuentran en París, Buenos Aires y Nueva York. Pero en cada una de las cartas, lo que insiste, con amor y fidelidad, es ese aquí estoy, todavía. Ese es el gesto que hoy se renueva con este libro y nos estremece con la fuerza de su vigencia: hay conversaciones que duran toda la vida e, incluso, más allá de la muerte.

Fascinante epistolario de Alejandra Pizarnik que contiene las cartas que la poeta envía a su amigo, el pintor y escritor Antonio Beneyto. Las cartas rescatadas en este libro nos permiten acercarnos al lado más personal de una de las más grandes poetas argentinas; en ellas se ofrece un retrato más íntimo que el que podría esbozar cualquier biógrafo.